Brian Naylor

In this role, he covers politics and federal agencies, including transportation and homeland security.

With more than 30 years of experience at NPR, Naylor has served as National Desk correspondent, White House correspondent, congressional correspondent, foreign correspondent and newscaster during All Things Considered. He has filled in as host on many NPR programs, including Morning Edition, Weekend Edition and Talk of the Nation.

During his NPR career, Naylor has covered many of the major world events, including political conventions, the Olympics, the White House, Congress and the mid-Atlantic region. Naylor reported from Tokyo in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, from New Orleans following the BP oil spill, and from West Virginia after the deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine.

While covering the U.S. Congress in the mid-1990s, Naylor's reporting contributed to NPR's 1996 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism award for political reporting.

Before coming to NPR in 1982, Naylor worked at NPR Member Station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, and at a commercial radio station in Maine.

At Sunday night's presidential debate, Donald Trump unwittingly launched a new meme. In the town hall setting, a Muslim woman asked the candidates about Islamaphobia.

Trump's response: "We have to be sure that Muslims come in and report when they see something going on."

Many have taken up the challenge on Twitter, and #muslimsreportstuff quickly went viral. Responses have ranged from sarcastic, to serious to funny. One of the first and perhaps most widely shared Tweet came from Brooklyn College professor Moustafa Bayoumi:

A riff by Donald Trump at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Monday night about Hillary Clinton's culpability in the deaths of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, is raising questions about where exactly Trump got his information and how.

During his speech, Trump held up a piece of paper. "This just came out a little while ago. I have to tell you this," Trump said as he read from the page, which he identified as an email from Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal.

The control tower at a major metropolitan airport can be a pretty chatty place.

Some of the chatter comes from air traffic controllers literally and phonetically spelling out the routes pilots need to follow to their destinations, using the foxtrot-lima-sierra-tango alphabet.

When a weather issue — say, a line of thunderstorms — pops up, routes have to be changed, often while the plane is already on the taxiway. So the controllers spell out new directions to the pilots, the pilots take them down and then carefully read back the instructions to the tower.

For months now, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump have been sparring at each other from afar. On Monday they'll do it face to face, on a stage at Hofstra University on Long Island in New York.

Debates have been a mainstay of presidential campaigns, it seems forever. But that's not quite the case: The first general election debate didn't occur until 1960, in a Chicago TV studio, between Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy.

Monday's debate between Clinton and Trump will take place on the 56th anniversary of that first debate.

The upcoming presidential election will mark a surprising first. Yes, a woman will be on the ballot as a major party nominee. But in addition, for the first time ever, the Organization of American States is sending poll observers to watch as U.S. voting takes place.

The OAS, based in Washington, D.C., has previously observed elections in 26 of its 34 member nations, but never before in the United States. The mission will be led by former Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla.

Former President Bill Clinton will take his wife's place at several campaign events in the next couple of days. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has been recovering from pneumonia at home after abruptly leaving a Sept. 11 commemoration ceremony in New York on Sunday, where her campaign said she became overheated and dehydrated.

Hillary Clinton was due to appear at fundraisers in California on Tuesday and make an appearance for a campaign event near Las Vegas on Wednesday, where her husband will now go instead.

One of the questions raised over the course of this year's presidential race is about how a President Trump would deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

One reason to wonder: the Republican Party platform's new language on policy towards Ukraine.

When Republican Party leaders drafted the platform prior to their convention in Cleveland last month, they had relatively little input from the campaign of then-presumptive nominee Donald Trump on most issues — except when it came to a future Republican administration's stance on Ukraine.

Now that the political conventions are over, its time to start thinking about the transition to the next president.

Yes, really.

As of August 1st, the federal government is making office space available to representatives of the Clinton and Trump campaigns to start making plans for taking over in January. If this seems a bit early, those who have been there say it's not.

Donald Trump is running for president as a Washington outsider. Yet to manage his campaign, he's picked someone who is very much a Washington insider. Paul Manafort has been a political operative and lobbyist for years, including for some controversial figures seeking to influence U.S. politics.

The Republican Party, as it prepares for its convention next week has checked off item No. 1 on its housekeeping list — drafting a party platform. The document reflects the conservative views of its authors, many of whom are party activists. So don't look for any concessions to changing views among the broader public on key social issues.